


The force, once more

by storminormin



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: (im never going to get that shirtless Kylo scene out of my head), AU, Also Luke doesn't try to murder his nephew, Alternate Universe - Ben Solo Doesn't Turn to the Dark Side, Friendship, Gen, The working title was TLJ sucked, Young Ben, Young Rey, and Luke's padawan camp - that did not get murdered brutally by Kylo, and dubious force ideology, but that felt a little strong, instead he and rey go on space adventures as teenagers and wreck EVERY plan snoke ever had, like Kylo's entire existence and his weird relationship with Rey, listen im barely in this fandom but i still watch the movies and tlj had some issues, so anyway I thought - if they can contact each other now then why not before?, so now you get, they probably meet Finn and Poe along the way i have no clue, this is completely an au because i have no clue how this would effect canon, while also looking for Ben's parents because they went missing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-09
Updated: 2019-05-09
Packaged: 2020-02-28 21:12:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18764329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/storminormin/pseuds/storminormin
Summary: The voice came to him in what he thought was a dream. She looked like one. With her sandblasted posture and her sandblasted cheeks. Wild hair pooled and flowed, entire galaxies in her reach but a thousand light years away.He blinked, feeling extremely off-balance and centered at the same time. Like the universe had spun itself around and stopped at this precise point just for them to meet.





	The force, once more

     “Hello, who are you?”

     The voice came to him in what he thought was a dream. She looked like one. With her sandblasted posture and her sandblasted cheeks. Wild hair pooled and flowed, entire galaxies in her reach but a thousand light years away.

     It distracted him incredibly from his meditating, and why wouldn’t it. The shock of hearing someone speak during meditation training was more than enough for him to breach consciousness with a sharp inhale. Stifling his irritation, he peeped an eye open to find Master Skywalker busy with another padawan; he screwed his eyes shut again, hoping that his teacher wouldn’t sense his lapse in concentration.

     The force was like a beach.

     Not like the sharp, pebbly one that they gathered the needle-crabs from, with its small bay, its rocky teeth in the water, and a steep drop-off that plunged to the depths of the icy sea. He’d never seen another beach, but somehow, the force was like this other beach.

     It was long with no real end to it. Once when Master Skywalker told him to meditate on their philosophic lesson that day, he’d walked down the shoreline. Miles and miles it stretched on, with nothing but the sound of the ever-crashing waves and the blissful lack of birds. After a while he ran. On and on down the beach he went, never tiring, but the beach was longer. Master Skywalker shook him awake after he missed the mealtime bell, and Ben felt his master’s concerned thoughts feathering around him, so after that he didn’t try to walk the beach.

     Instead, he would sit in the sand and watch the waves. Sometimes he actually meditated -double meditation, would that be correct?- even if it didn’t help with Master Skywalker’s philosophic questions. The oncoming waves would brush his toes, leaving the tingling sensation of power, farther in. Something had to push the waves after all. They crashed heavily on miles and miles of shoreline, never resting, and feebly trickling back only to regain force; whatever pushed it lay farther in and farther under.

     The force was like this beach.

     But he didn’t dare try the waves. He would sit on the beach, but laying claim to the water felt wrong.

     And that was where he first saw the girl.

     After making sure that Master Skywalker had not caught his lapse in concentration, he took a breath and slipped back onto the beach where she stood, ghostly in her pale wrappings and the salt-spray around her, looking out over the water in wonder. She turned to him, her eyes lingering on the watery expanse wistfully.

     “Hello again.”

     He blinked, feeling extremely off-balance and centered at the same time. Like the universe had spun itself around and stopped at this precise point just for them to meet.

     The wind laughed and it felt like a hundred thoughts bent to see what would become of this moment in the cosmos, an ethereal trick of coincidence.

     “Hi… My name is Ben. Solo.” He righted himself, determined to make a good impression, and looked to her wild eyes and wild hair, “Are you the force?”

     “Who’s the force?” She asked, tilting her head, now giving him her full attention; she took in his appearance and Ben was aware of how pressed and clean he must look compared to her ragged terrain-worn apparel. He dug his toes into the sand and chewed the inside of his lip.

     “I don‘t suppose you are then.” he said, sitting down in the - _itchy_ \- sand, only slightly disappointed. It would have been something good to show Master Skywalker if only to prove that he wasn’t really as bad at meditating as the other padawans thought he was.

     She walked over to him, standing nervously for a moment, then sitting down with her legs crossed, unbothered by the unpaved ground. The force watched… and waited. And then the girl spoke.

     “My name’s Rey, and I’m pretty sure this is a dream.”  
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     Getting to know Rey was fun. Much more fun than meditating. She told him about how she lived- vastly different from him- and he told her about how he lived; he told her the stories that Master Skywalker told, ones about the war among the stars, battles between Jedi masters of old, and the story of the prophecy of the chosen one. Ben even told her the one about the princess and the smuggler. That one was his favorite because uncle Chewy was in it.

     They waded ankle-deep in the crystalline waters. She told him about scrapping and heat, the whip-crack dry earth and the blazing sun, and how she had found a plant once. It had been brownish and crinkly except for the single pale bloom on it; she had folded her hands around it, sparing it from the sun for a brief moment, feeling the silk brush of its life underneath her calloused finger pads. He told her how he had slipped on a stair-step during one of the coldest nights of the season, cutting his hands on the ice-slicked rocks along the cliffside. It had taken weeks for the palm-length slices to heal, but it had left some pretty neat scars.

     Rey still had more than him though.

     They were on her ankles, arms, and wrists from digging through scrap yards with her clever little fingers and quick thinking hands. One scar across her cheek from a close call. And one across her back for an insolent word. She still got the loot though, she told him with an aggressive smile.

     “Teach me how to braid.” He said, watching her swiftly put her hair up, intertwining tendrils of string with her hair.

     She had wrinkled her nose. “What for?”

     “So I can show my mom when she comes to see me.”

     Rey silently handed him some string and began to demonstrate.

     “What is your mom like?”

     Ben had spent the rest of the evening struggling to make his braids as perfect and even as Rey’s, telling her about his mom, his dad, uncle Chewy, and Uncle Luke -who he had to call Master Skywalker because Ben was a padawan and there were ‘rules’ about it. Rey listened with as much attention as she used correcting his braids (constantly), and when she looked out at the great nothing on the beach, shaking (silently), Ben didn’t ask about her family.

     Getting to know Rey was mostly fun. It was still much better than meditating.

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     Rey looked like a ghost more times than not.

     Sometimes Ben wouldn’t see her for days at a time and he would wonder.

     So far, she had always come back. Raw and red, as if the sand she trod so lightly on had forgotten her littleness and tumbled her around too roughly. Rey would venture far (too far) into the waves so that when she sat only her head was above the water. She fell asleep like that once (asleep in a meditative dream? Ben still didn’t know). She had spluttered in surprise but laughed at how quickly Ben had run into deep waves to keep his dry-walker from drowning. Ben always sat by her side after that.

     Ben learned to lift stones with his mind and Rey learned to use leverage and a big stick. She ran ragged and Ben ran rebellious, each in their own.

     His ceremonial braid got longer.

     Her wrapping cloths needed more length.

     “If the old Jedi couldn’t have attachments, why did they fight?”

     “No idea,” he said, moving slowly through his morning katas, “Master Skywalker seems to disagree with the teachings, but he won’t ever say it out loud.”

     “He must have attachments.” Rey’s eyes were keen, watching his movements and copying the forms. Her steps were stiff with blistered feet but her arms were quick and graceful. “I wonder if he approves of them.”

     A shrug would unbalance him, but he did his most exaggerated one. “He still talks to my mom, so he can’t be too terribly against it.”

     Rey ghosted along the ground in tandem with Ben, not even the sand shifting to betray her presence. The desert looked after its own of course.

     “Probably for the best,” he muttered. “I think she would drag him back out into space if he ignored her holocalls, force sensitive or not.”

     Her snort of laughter had an echo of relief. “I’m glad the old Jedi order is gone.”

     “Me too.”

     They continued the familiar routine until the breakfast bell sounded. Rey stood tall- though Ben was getting taller- and bowed, and Ben repeated the gesture. She stood in the cool sand, hair rising around her face as the wind tried to steal it; against the morning sun, her clothing made her look like the mirages she had told Ben about, there one moment and gone the next. Ben reluctantly left to join the community meal, and Rey wrapped her feet tighter.

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     Ben became broad. Rey became wiry.

     Together their katas grew more creative and cooperative. Ben couldn’t spar with the other padawans easily, as accustomed to Rey as he had become. The other padawans thought he was haughty. Master Skywalker thought he was simply uncooperative. Ben thought the irony of this landing him more meditation was hilarious. Rey thought he was sun touched. The force just crooned around them as they locked arms and weapons, joining and breaking with the swell of the force around them.

     His hands became rough from fighting with practice sabers. Hers were rougher still.

     She disappeared for days on end to find better scavenging spots. The waves grew quiet and bitter at the loss, reaching out far onto the beach in search of companionship and drawing back silently.

     She always brought back tidal waves, but they swam without fear.

     Her hair flowed free in the clear blue and the sun couldn’t catch her deep beneath the waves. Ben felt the force around them as Rey instinctually understood it, strong, steady and joyful. Ben had learned by the teachings of others. Rey had learned from the source.

     It was unbearably quiet when Ben left to finish his training. Kyber crystals were incredibly rare, and known locations were safeguarded fiercely. Rey would know.

     She waited on the sunless beach for him to return.

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     Master Skywalker wasn’t there to complete his ceremony. No one was. Only blaster burns and overturned carts, droplets of dried, liquid iron and shreds of fabric with the aching, fading scent of home.

     Ben cut off the ceremonial braid with his newborn saber in a slash of purple.

     The beach was empty. It stayed empty for the two weeks that it took Ben to fix up the emergency beacon. Rey was nowhere to be seen, heard, or sensed.

     It was three weeks before he discovered the reason for his empty home.

     It was three weeks and two seconds later that he swore vengeance on the empire that took his friends and uncle.

     It was four weeks before he was able to hail a ride to a populated world with a transportation hub. Five weeks before his plans were immediately derailed by a force spike in his chest, one that pulled his attention towards a travel brochure to a place that looked like both actual hell and the answer to his hopes all at once. All he needed to see was miles and miles of sand and he had thrown the last of his credits towards the fastest ride there.

     The planet was as bad as the brochure advertised, and the population was worse. Traders and slavers mostly, but the sight of scavengers with wrapped hands and feet were enough. He followed the force’s incessant tugs and wondered if she felt it too. The force holding its breath. The eyes of the cosmos on them.

     It was five weeks, five days, and thirteen hours before the force released the breath it had been holding like a cold slap to the face, sending Ben almost tumbling over the top of the sand dune he’d just climbed. _What_. He looked up.

     She stood desert-wrapped and sunburned and _exhausted_ ; not the conventional look for an answer to hopes and dreams, but Ben always hated convention. Her wild hair whipped in the wind, not full of galaxies but certainly full of her, no longer ghostly but corporeal as she leaned against her staff.

     They collided with each other; the impact brought Rey’s arms tightly around his chest and her deft hands clenched into the fabric of the back of his cloak, trembling faintly. His arms were wrapped as far around her as they could go, meeting his own shoulders as they both jammed their heads as close as they could get, curled together like they had been missing each other for their whole lives (they had). Rey lifted her head and grabbed his jaw on both sides so she could look at him, really look at him, for the first time. Ben obliged, content to imprint the memory of her face into his head forever; they were both trembling. They laughed softly, wetly, the force around them peaceful and still in a way it had never been before, like it had been waiting for this particular moment, this cosmic coincidence, for a very, very long time.

     They made their way towards the hideout that Rey had made.

     Her absence was explained in careful steps and the hollows of her cheeks, eyes that glittered dangerously and scanned the skies for worse. Whatever had come for uncle Luke had come here too.

     They needed to know what was happening and they needed a plan; Ben knew that his mom and dad would be at the heart of it. So that is where they needed to be.

     So by that train of thought, they were going to need a ship. And Rey knew just where to get one.


End file.
